Seamless teaching and learning through GitHub Classroom and Visual Studio Code

Students learning computer science are met with numerous challenges beyond just the course material. Complex tooling, confusing setup, and overwhelming systems can frustrate students and teachers alike before even starting their coursework.
To explore these challenges, we have met with numerous students and professors​ around the world to explore these challenges.

1. Real-world tools assume you’re a pro: Professional developers like to customize their tools, so environments support advanced customizations, without always showing the quick and easy getting started route.
2. Educators are oversubscribed: Teachers need to scale without sacrificing quality.
3. Students are overwhelmed without easy access to help: Friction with tools often causes students to drop their intro classes.

As a result, we’re excited to bring together Visual Studio Code and GitHub Classroom for a seamless teaching and learning experience with our latest extension!

Visual Studio Code extensions let you add additional tooling to your base installation to best support your workflow. This GitHub Classroom extension for Visual Studio Code provides a simplified introduction to Git, GitHub Classroom, and Visual Studio Code, while providing students with key GitHub Classroom capabilities, like integrated autograding and live collaboration.

Learn with Visual Studio Code

GitHub Classroom aims to make it as simple as possible for students to get started with GitHub. As a part of this effort, our extension for Visual Studio Code provides a student-centric experience focused on making it even easier for students to manage their assignments.

Students can either self-install the extension and import their assignments, or use the one-click “Open in Visual Studio Code” experience from any assignment in which a teacher enables Visual Studio Code as an editor.

Once in the extension, students can browse their code, edit, and commit changes, submit their assignment, and see their integrated autograding results. Also, for group projects and office hours, students can use Microsoft Live Share to collaborate with their group members and/or TAs!

Read more on how to get started in our docs!

Teach with Visual Studio Code

Rather than spending a lot of time in office hours setting up student machines, we’ve added an option for teachers to include a magic “Open in Visual Studio Code” button on student assignments. Once a student clicks this button, we will handle installing Visual Studio Code and the extension if needed. It will then open up directly to that assignment! Magic, if we do say so ourselves. ✨

To utilize Visual Studio Code as the preferred editor for your assignment, select the Visual Studio Code option when creating a new assignment.

Now, all student repositories will include the badge below!

Get started today

As a student or teacher, you can install the extension today via the Visual Studio Code Marketplace! Teachers, you can also experiment with creating Visual Studio Code enabled assignments by creating a new assignment via GitHub Classroom.

Written by

Katherine Kampf

@acrokat